Did you know that one in every 100,000 children in the U.S. under the age of 18 is diagnosed with a diseased state of the heart known as cardiomyopathy ? While it is a relatively rare condition in kids, it poses serious health risks, making early diagnosis important. As the heart weakens due to abnormities...

The following excerpt is from a blog post by American Heart Association CEO Nancy Brown and AHA volunteer Tommy Watson, published on The Huffington Post's The Blog on September 3rd. It is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post and the American Heart Association addressing important, timely...

Thanks to the tireless efforts of AHA volunteers and staff, we are pleased to announce that North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue signed House Bill 837 into law on July 26, 2012. The law requires all students to be trained in CPR before graduating from high school, helping to train our next generation...

Bert Carey Newburyport, MA
Bert suffered sudden cardiac arrest. Fortunately, when he collapsed, he was in a small store in Newburyport where an 18-year-old senior in high school, Derek, happened to be shopping for a tux for the prom. Derek had just completed a CPR course, which is a graduation requirement...

Olivia Q Winthrop, MA
More than two-dozen first-graders were squealing and bouncing balls on a mid-February morning in the gym in an East Boston school when six-year-old Olivia suddenly collapsed. No one saw it coming. The little girl with the strawberry-blonde hair and no front teeth had been in...

Hard work pays off. After 6 months of lobbying lawmakers in Vermont, 8 th grader Tommy Watson and many other AHA volunteers were successful in having Governor Shumlin sign a bill to include CPR and AED instruction in health education courses. By including both “hands-only” and AED components...

On April 23, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton signed a law that will ensure that everyone who graduates from high school will be trained in hands-only CPR. With this bill, Minnesota students between grades 7 and 12 will receive hands-only CPR training at least once before they graduate. The training can...

Aimed to prepare more Tennesseans to respond in emergency instances of sudden cardiac arrest, the American Heart Association urged the Tennessee General Assembly to add hands-on cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training to the high school lifetime wellness school curriculum that already existed in...

When Derek, a high school senior, learned CPR at school, he didn’t think he’d have a chance to use it so soon, and he certainly didn’t think he’d get that chance while shopping for his prom tux. But shortly after he was trained in CPR, as one of his graduation requirements , he...